Architecture: Walk on the Wild Side

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The High Line is a 1.5-mile elevated railway track that served for decades as a way to bring freight into lower Manhattan. By 1980 the trains had stopped running and the tracks were sliding into decades of spectacular decay that was also a kind of blossoming. Nature re-established itself. Saplings and wind-sown grasses sprouted in rail beds where the homeless built campfires at night. Whole stretches made you think of the Appian Way after the fall of the Roman Empire, the almost phosphorescent decrepitude of a vanished civilization made even stranger by the fact that an intact, modern city was churning away all around it. But in the '90s, as real estate values on the streets below started rising, developers began to clamor for the tracks to be demolished to make way for their perennial notion of utopia, which consists almost entirely of luxury apartments.

And this would have happened if a community group, the Friends of the High Line, had not pushed for a more imaginative alternative. Incredibly, they prevailed, or at least have so far. Last year saw the groundbreaking for a park conceived through a collaboration between the artist-architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the landscape designer James Corner of Field Operations, which is also the firm behind the landfill park at Fresh Kills. Their plan calls for stretches of the High Line to be planted in ways meant to recall the self-seeded trees and grasses that sprouted there in the past. That's to remind visitors of the processes of decay and renewal basic to the metabolism of any city. And because this quasi-natural environment will be held within the compartment of an indisputably man-made railway, the High Line will also be an ingenious contribution to that historic dialogue between the natural and the manufactured.

Corner says he hopes the completed High Line, still a work in progress that's currently budgeted at $94 million, "will have the attributes of something strange and otherworldly, something 'found,' but nothing that could be said to be a ruin." If anything, its future now looks so promising that developers are rushing in with proposals for luxury condos along its route, and the Whitney Museum of American Art is planning a sizable new facility there for contemporary art.

Which brings us back to the Olympic Sculpture Park. With its clever switchback paths, the Weiss/Manfredi design capitalizes on the park's magnificent views by constantly bringing you back around to them in different ways. All the while it draws those views into a complex fabric of references to the city. So by narrowing and widening the routes, for instance, the designers create false perspectives that recall airport landing paths, an illusion they've underlined along one stretch with a string of low-rise "runway" lights. This is a park that doesn't try to separate nature and civilization. What it does instead is lead you to reflect on how they penetrate each other just about everywhere you go. Maybe somebody should have told Thoreau that if he couldn't get away from the sound of that train whistle, the thing to do was just whistle along with it.